Sunday, May 25, 2008

Google's Sichuan People Search

About a day and a half after the earthquake, Google launched a custom search engine allowing people to search for information about their relatives and friends in Sichuan. It crawls different websites and forums so people can find out if those they care about are safe, or otherwise. Within 10 days it had already connected at least 1000 people with their relatives and friends in Sichuan.

Working at Google last summer made me quite the fangirl, so I decided to share the Google love with my Stanford classmates by organizing a trip to the Beijing office. We were missing a few people who decided on the spur of the moment to fly out to Xinjiang, but about 15 of us taxied over to Google on Friday and had a nice little company visit. They told us about Google's business in China and some of their projects, including the aforementioned people search for the Sichuan earthquake.

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